Yamashita’s Gold (known also as Yamashita’s Treasure) is the name given to the alleged war loot accumulated by the Japanese armed forces in Southeast Asia during the Second World War. This alleged...
Dotting the landscapes of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, fulachtaí fia remain a mystery from millennia gone by. The most common type of prehistoric archaeological site in Ireland, fulachtaí...
Many years after the destruction of the great libraries of the ancient world, such as the libraries of Pergamum and Alexandria, the Imperial Library of Constantinople preserved precious Ancient Greek...
The delightful hobby of playing games isn't a modern invention. While people in ancient times didn't have Pokemon Go to entertain themselves, they still spent hours of fun games both inside and...
It is probably not possible to tell when humans first began to wonder about the stars, the sun, and the moon or try to understand their motion, though there is evidence of a lunar calendar being used...
Until the Age of Enlightenment, it was widely believed that every land creature had its counterpart in the sea (and perhaps even in the heavens). The classic example of this belief is the horse,...
To hear her harrowing wail tear through the night sky was an omen of certain death. The cry of the banshee implied that someone in your family had died or was about to– or, that you were about to...
The most widely used calendar around the world today is called the Gregorian calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th century CE and was a modification of an ancient Roman...
Once a lively outpost on the early Mesopotamian trade route, Godin Tepe now sits in ruins in Iran. Controversial archaeological excavations in the 1960s and 70s highlighted some of the rich cultural...
Cleopatra of Macedon stood in the shadow of her more famous brother, Alexander the Great. In fact, she was one of his three known sisters, apart from Cynane and Thessalonica. However, Cleopatra was...
A few surviving records show that Ahhotep was a woman who was stronger, braver, and a more powerful ruler than the average man. Her thrilling story starts in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and ends in...
When we think of the Romans, gift-giving, carol-singing and celebrating the birth of Christ don’t immediately present themselves. Waging wars, general oppression and a never-ending desire to rule the...
A group of archaeologists working in an elite cemetery in Egypt have unearthed the remains of an ancient wall that was hiding for centuries beneath a sandy pathway. The first examination of its rocky...
Maybe the solstice sunlight-trapping “roof box” in Ireland’s ancient Newgrange stone monument is not a 5,000-year-old astronomical feature but rather a construct that is just 50 years old. The box on...
A team of researchers from the University of Haifa have recently discovered a rare inscription from the period prior to the Bar Kochba revolt. The enlightening discovery allows historians to finally...
In the Doctor Who Christmas Special from 2010, Michael Gambon’s Scrooge-like character remarks that across different cultures and worlds people come together to mark the midpoint of winter. It is, he...
The people of ancient Rome knew of a tragic hero Drusus (Drusus the Elder), the younger brother of Tiberius who died in a campaign. But there was another, younger and lesser known, Drusus in Tiberius...
Although many people would imagine that the oldest university in the world is in Europe or China, it’s not. The oldest standing university on Earth is in Morocco. Founded in 859 AD, Al-Qarawiyyin is...
Sawney Bean is a legendary figure from Scotland, who is said to have been a prolific cannibal. Together with his equally cannibalistic family, Sawney Bean murdered and robbed unfortunate victims from...
The mummified face of Pharaoh Sety I (Seti I) still shows that he was not only extremely powerful but also very handsome during his lifetime. Sety’s tomb was brought back to the world on October 16,...
During the summer of 2016, a beautiful bronze brooch was found opportunely at Agdenes farm, at the outermost part of the Trondheim Fjord in mid-Norway, buried as a status symbol in the grave of a...
A group of scientists and researchers have found evidence that a highly advanced ancient civilization could have existed in Brazil. Almost 500 years before the European colonization of the Americas...
Every year, almost without thinking about it, we incorporate certain plant species into out Christmas celebrations. The most obvious is the Christmas tree, linked historically in England to Prince...
In a remote part of North-East England called the Yorkshire Wolds, an incident took place on Sunday 13th December 1795 that not only became talking point of late 18th century London society but also...
![Ibn al-Haytham ("Alhasen") on the left pedestal of reason [while Galileo is on the right pedestal of the senses] as shown on the frontispiece of the Selenographia (Science of the Moon; 1647) of Johannes Hevelius. Source: Public domain provided by the author](https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/styles/slideshow/public/field/image/Ibn-al-Haytham-optics.jpg?itok=IeK5wUZc)
